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Focal Aria Speakers Have Arrived

Focal Aria Speakers Have Arrived

We just received our first shipment of the new highly anticipated Focal Aria Series Speakers.

On display are the Floorstanding Aria 936 in Walnut and Bookshelf Aria 906. You have to hear these to believe the sound!

The Aria 900 Series marks a new milestone for Focal and a new chapter in highfidelity technology.

About the new Focal Aria Series:
Flax sandwich cone

Made in France but affordable, Flax cones are oriented towards acoustic performance, high-tech and give an original design to the brand’s speaker drivers!

After more than five years of research and development, engineers at Focal can now reveal a new cone made of high-quality flax fibers. F cone are characterised by their natural sound, with low coloration, their richness of reproduction in the midrange register and their tighter bass.

The unique qualities of flax

F cones are made of high-quality flax fibers core enclosed by two thin layers of glass fiber. They satisfy the key criteria of a high performance diaphragm : high internal damping, high velocity of sound and high flexural rigidity.

Rigidity

All these criteria cannot be met by a mono-material cone. Sandwich technology greatly influences the neutrality of the sound produced by the cone, something, which has always been Focal’s hallmark. The expertise gained from the sandwich technology of the Utopia and K2 Power ranges enabled Focal to develop a revolutionary flax-fiber cone conciliating the 3 criteria.

Lightness

Flax is twice as light as fiberglass, because the fiber is hollow. It also has very low elasticity which makes it ideal to increase the flexural rigidity of a sandwich structure. Moreover, it can be obtained in non-woven bundles of considerable diameter and it can therefore produce the thickness required for a sandwich.

Internal damping

Composite materials have properties suitable for applications where both rigidity and low mass are required. However, their disadvantage is that they lack damping, which leads to very poor control of vibrations. Recent developments in this field combining composites and natural fibers have brought unexpected opportunities. Flax fiber has an excellent internal damping of the same order of magnitude as the glass or Kevlar fibers or aluminum.

TNF TweeterDesigned and made in France, the range features brand-new speaker drivers with Flax sandwich cones, new TNF Aluminium/ Magnesium inverted dome tweeters with Poron suspension, injected zamak baskets, carefully designed cabinets and crossovers: nothing has been spared when it comes to maximising listening pleasure for well-informed music lovers.

Focal brand’s signature product, the inverted dome tweeter has been continually developed ever since it was created. It bears repeating that its main advantage, apart from its very low directivity, lies in its use of a coil of small diameter (hence very light and better accelerating) directly fixed to the rigid dome.

Just as with the cones of its bass and midrange speaker drivers, what makes Focal unique is working directly on the sound output and, therefore, on the mechanical characteristics of materials. When we introduced the pure Beryllium inverted dome tweeter ten or so years ago, we clearly demonstrated the decisive advantage of this exclusive technology.

For the TNF tweeter, we have brought two major evolutions to our aluminium/magnesium tweeter. The suspension between the dome and its bracket uses Poron, a material with shape memory.

This suspension method is directly derived from the famous Utopia Beryllium tweeter, making it possible to reduce distortion by a factor of three in the 2-3 kHz range, where the human ear has very great sensitivity.